by Gael Bissell and Linda Winnie
The Flathead Lakers will be presented with the Flathead Audubon Society’s 2024 partnership Conservation Achievement Recognition at the May 13 general meeting. Based in Polson, Montana, the Flathead Lakers have been hard at work for the last 65 years helping protect water quality, floodplains, and critical habitats in the Flathead Lake watershed.
The Laker’s have initiated many innovative and highly effective programs to encourage stewardship of the land and protection of water quality in the Flathead Valley through education, advocacy, and partnerships. They offer watershed education programs in schools that include both classroom materials and field trips. They have developed citizen science projects in which community members help evaluate water quality and monitor aquatic vegetation. The Lakers have been early, and persistent, advocates for a program to protect Flathead Lake and Montana from aquatic invasive species; they organized the first volunteer boat inspections for zebra mussels on Flathead Lake. They actively monitor growth policies, legislation, and development proposals, advocating for science-based water quality protection measures. The Lakers participate in a number of watersheds working groups, and partner with the Flathead Lake Biological Station to carry out a variety of educational and citizen projects, and to provide monthly science talks for the community.
In 1999 and 2001, Constanza Von der Palen with the Flathead Lakers set up two important workshops for The Critical Lands Project. She brought together resource staff and volunteers from land trusts, landowners, federal and state agencies, several non-profits and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to identify those lands in the Flathead Basin that are critical to maintaining the water quality of Flathead Lake and its major tributaries, and to develop criteria for evaluating these critical lands according to the importance and feasibility of providing them conservation protection and restoration. The goal was to then find a way to protect and restore these critical resources in the face of already increasing development pressures.
It was Constanza who saw in these early workshops a fantastic collaborative opportunity, realizing that if we did not all work together, we would probably not be very successful. This group evolved into the Flathead River to Lake Initiative (RTL), officially formed in 2006, whose goal was to identify, conserve, and restore lands critical in the upper Flathead basin, not only to protect water quality in Flathead Lake, but to also protect wetlands, forests, floodplains, agricultural lands, and the shallow aquifer that underlies much of the Flathead Valley and north shore. This group worked closely with willing private landowners who knew that they were stewarding some of the most productive and important lands along the river system. Over the past two decades, R2L partners successfully protected nearly 7,000 acres, contributing to a conservation network of almost 13,000 acres along the Flathead River. Constanza was and still is the key to this Collaborative keeping the RTL on task and highly productive.
Over the last decade, the Lakers created the River to Lake Conservation Fund to directly support land conservation efforts. They were instrumental in raising significant funding for the state’s purchase of the Bad Rock Canyon Wildlife Management Area, Somers Beach State Park, and more recently, for Flathead Land Trust’s purchase of the Owen Sowerwine conservation easement.
The conservation work of the Flathead Lakers has provided significant benefits to all of the Flathead Basin – to the lives of the people who live and recreate here, the quality of its waters, and the preservation of its critical lands and wildlife. Flathead Audubon is honored to recognize the Flathead Lakers for their far-reaching conservation vision and their diverse and successful campaigns on behalf of this region’s water resources, its natural landscapes, and our quality of life. Thank you, Flathead Lakers!
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